Prince on his concert tour in Australia: ‘This show is 4 me, the fans and history’
IN A rare opportunity, national music editor Kathy McCabe interviews pop royalty Prince after his surprise announcement about touring Australia this month.
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PRINCE is pop’s mystery man, a force of creative genius who has closely guarded his privacy and process.
The funky control freak has rarely lifted the veil for the world to see into his universe — a purple-hued fantasy land where music, art and his eccentric vision exist according to his rules.
Over the past two decades, he has periodically peeled back the curtain to invite fans into his realm, staging impromptu concerts at his Paisley Park headquarters to preview new songs or celebrate a reinvention of his inestimable catalogue of music from the fabled Vault where he keeps hundreds, perhaps thousands of unreleased works.
While he has always stepped away from the arena stage to perform secret club shows for his legion of loyal fans, the shock announcement of his Piano & A Microphone tour on Friday exploded social media into a frenzy of fanboy and fangirl glee.
Just two weeks after he premiered his solo show with two sets at his Minnesota headquarters, Prince suddenly revealed he would take it on the road to perform 10 concerts in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland in February.
As he teased his Down Under fans with the tour details on Twitter and via his longtime Australian promoter Paul Dainty on Friday, I received the invitation of a lifetime.
Prince has always been the interview at the top of my bucket list, the elusive Holy Grail for any music writer in the world.
He rarely does them and in the past, only under rather vexing conditions which prohibited any recording of it. Not even a pen and paper.
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I was asked to submit five questions to an artist of whom I could ask hundreds, and to do so immediately.
When his answers came back a day later, I was shaking reading his responses written in Prince’s language, the numbers 2 and 4 and letters U and B littered throughout and EYE substituted in accordance with his latest musical manifestation with his backing band 3rd Eye Girl.
They released two records HITnRUN Phase One and Two last year.
The Rolling Stone review of his January 21 debut of the Piano & A Microphone show framed the show as an emotional and autobiographical rollercoaster ride through his catalogue and his life.
It was acutely intimate. Prince emerged from a shroud of smoke to sit at a purple baby grand by candlelight, his fans closer to their idol than ever before.
No band, just the great man and his songs and stories about trying to master the instrument played by his jazz pianist father John Nelson, a man he has said was difficult to please.
I asked him if the intimacy of the occasion, being able to see his fans reactions to every note and snippet of conversation affected his performance.
“That’s a good ?estion...EYE have only per4med two concerts completely alone onstage and have found the absolute silence a turn on,” he wrote.
“It 4ces U 2 listen with not only Ur ears but also the heart.
“After the concert, EYE couldn’t wait 2 do it again.”
The Paisley Park performance was also remarkable for the personal stories of his childhood as he revealed his struggle to perfect his playing to his father’s satisfaction and emerge from his shadow.
He revealed he would sneak downstairs to play the piano without permission in an attempt to figure out how his father performed certain pieces.
“I thought I would never be able to play like my dad,” he told the audience.
“And he never missed an opportunity to remind me of it.”
Prince said the Piano & A Microphone show is a tribute to his father.
“One concert-goer said that her father was exactly the same - a strong-willed, hard 2 please teacher that was never satisfied,” he wrote to me.
“This concert is a thank U if anything 2 my father and the gift he gave me.”
While his arena concert performances - his latest tour of Australia was in 2012 - are ecstatic celebrations of a lifetime of pop and funk mastery, the stripped-back solo show strikes a deeper emotional chord, even in its sexier explorations of classics such as Raspberry Beret and I Wanna Be Your Lover.
This mystery man isn’t reticent about showing his vulnerable side in the quieter moments, confessing he can be overcome by the force of his feelings as he plays.
No doubt the piano and what it represents of his childhood provokes a sentimental journey for the 57-year-old artist, one he reveals he often takes just by himself at his Paisley Park wonderland.
“Many nights EYE have played 4 myself as the sole audience member and stopped mid-song overcome by emotion,” he wrote.
“That feeling is increased several fold by the presence of others.
“It can’t really B described, only experienced.”
Think Prince and it is likely the first image which springs to mind is him shredding his guitar on that signature Purple Rain solo, his face contorted with ecstasy, his body pulsing with every note.
The Piano & A Microphone concert offers a unique opportunity to witness his virtuosity at this instrument with the Rolling Stone review remarking at the fluidity of his performance at the keys.
Prince wrote that he hasn’t considered the differences of his artistic expression via the two distinct instruments he has used to craft songs from When Doves Cry to Alphabet Street over four decades and 39 albums.
“EYE never intellectualised it but EYE am curious 2 know what the difference is 2 U,” he wrote.
Wearing mauve pyjamas at the Paisley Park concerts, he ran through a dizzying selection of songs which drew not only from his own albums but also covered Joni Mitchell’s A Case Of You and Unchain My Heart by Ray Charles.
The privileged thousands who will witness his A Piano & A Microphone concerts here can count on even more songs being introduced into the show, with Prince one of the few performers left in the modern pop pantheon who never sticks to the same setlist.
After all the thousands of concerts he has performed over his career, I wondered who this show is for, an indulgence for the artist or a gift for his fans.
Prince didn’t discriminate.
“This show is 4 me, the fans and history,” he wrote.
Prince PLAYS TWO SHOWS AT the Sydney Opera House on February 20 and TWO SHOWS at the State Theatre on February 21.
TICKETS on sale from noon Tuesday.
Originally published as Prince on his concert tour in Australia: ‘This show is 4 me, the fans and history’
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